28 September 2008

Listen Up, Young'uns

If McCain doesn't stop being a poster boy for senile dementia, I may start dissing seniors myself. And I am one. Sheesh!

Meanwhile, here's one fully cognizant elder with a few things to say about this election:

Point -- I do not want to have a beer with the President of the United States. The POTUS should be taking care of business, not taking beer breaks with me.

Point -- I do not want "someone like me" running the country. I want someone in that job who's a helluva lot more knowledgeable about public affairs than I am.

Point -- I am not put off by people who rise in our society through merit and hard work. The first person in my clan to go to college, I worked my way through by doing menial jobs and earned a magna cum laude -- even if it took me a lot of years to do it. When I finally got the degree, it meant I didn't have to keep doing the menial jobs. There were relatives and family friends who thought I must be uppity, assumed I'd be looking down on them. I know this territory.

What if we backed off and saw that upward mobility is a prime manifestation of The American Dream? Study hard. Dream big. Work your butt off. And you can earn a place in this country that's some notches up the ladder from where you started. There are still plenty of countries where that's not possible. We should be mega-proud that in America the son of a young single mom can work hard, dream big -- and run for President. Gimme a U!S!A! Instead, the Rovenistas throw "elitist" at Obama and rile people up to assume he's looking down on them. I say this is an un-American attitude.

Point -- I do not consider candidates' opposition to their own political parties as a measure of the candidates' judgment and courage. What if they're in the party because they agree with the party's philosophy and positions? How dumb would they be to then work against those positions?

Billing the Republican ticket as reformers is based on this way of framing a candidate. McCain and Palin have sometimes gone up against their own party. All praise be unto them. And how often have Obama and Biden taken stands against their party? Aha! They must lack courage and a concern for the citizenry. It's ridiculous, and pundits such as George Stefanopoulus have bought into it, asking Obama to prove his merit by citing times he's opposed his party.

In their brilliant Palin/Clinton sketch, Saturday Night Live's writers invited the media to "grow a pair." Maybe it's not just testicles that are lacking in all this, but brain cells as well. It's enough to make you worry that juvenile dementia may be on the march.

31 May 2008

What You "Know" About Rabies Shots Is Wrong

Setting: a house in the forest on a Puget Sound island, two people sitting on a porch at dusk, lovely dinner before us, good talk, perfect weather. And some flying thing lands fast on my arm and whips back into the forest. "That was weird." And we proceed with the salad.

A little later I saw there was dried blood my arm. Another weirdness. Washed it off and forgot about it.

Two nights later I'm in a carpool with friends and one stranger, heading into Seattle for a meeting. The stranger turns out to be a longtime veterinarian. We're all telling living-in-the boonies stories and I mention the sudden flight to and from my arm, over a peaceful meal.

Wise vet says, Dusk? Small, fast flier? And there was blood on your arm? The odds are it was a bat, and healthy ones don't do that.

The dots were suddenly connected. My first question was, Am I too late for the hideous vaccine? I still had 8 days to get them started. First bullet dodged.

Reading everything I could get my hands on that night, I learned that rabies is 100% fatal. But what if it was just a bird? What if it was a perfectly fine bat who'd found some intoxicating berries and was just drunk? What were the odds that the one rabid bat on the island had decided to fly into me? I did not want foot-long vaccine needles in my belly, which "everyone" knows is the rabies protocol.

First thing in the morning, at my family doctor's office, the consensus was total -- skin broken, you get the shots -- and they didn't have them in stock.

The Public Health service had to have an incident report and confirmed that there hadn't been a human rabies case here for decades. But when they capture island bats for testing, almost half of them have rabies. Well, swell. Long needles here I come.

I headed up the island to the ER, shaking, but knowing that without the shots I could be frothing at the mouth, going nuts and dying in one of the most painful ways possible.

The important thing to know in all this: the conventional wisdom is a fiction. I had one shot of vaccine -- in the shoulder, and four others -- gamma globulin in the wounds, and in the hips. Nothing hurt anymore that any shot you've ever had. And the vaccine is 100% effective in preventing death by rabies.

So pass this on! Warm weather is here, more and more people will be outside in the evening. Bats are out there too. And other critters that might be rabid. If you or anyone you know has a close encounter with one of them, you don't have to fear the shots. Get them!

And thank the family of one Mary Bigelow for the fact that the shots are no longer the nightmare they used to be. Here's the astonishing message she sent me:

"Let me tell you why you get to have 4 shots in the arm instead of 21 in the belly: in one word -- my Mom. There were 11 of us who went through the rabies series in the 70's because my cat got bit by a bat and died of rabies. Because it was an outdoor cat and confirmed rabid, they quarantined a 6-mile radius around our house--most of the area was farming cows, horses, sheep, and minks. All domestic animals had to be kept indoors, all livestock had to be immunized, could not be bred during the quarantine, could not be butchered, etc. We were not very popular.

"My Mom had a reaction to the duck embryo so they used her as a guinea pig for the brand new human serum. When we were all done with the horrible belly shots, we donated our blood so they could create the human serum they now use!"

So all hail Mary Bigelow and her family! Now go forth and spread the word that everybody's got it wrong about rabies shots. Me, I just had my second round, with two more to go. Zero problem. Freak-out cancelled.

Also no fangs growing, no sleeping in a coffin, and I'm doing just fine in full sunshine. People can now stop holding up crucifixes when I pass.

10 February 2008

Remembering Maharishi

With the news that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has left this world, I'm posting scenes from a novel-in-progress that describe encounters with the man. Enjoy.

Fiuggi had been taken over by the Maharishi’s entourage and hundreds of transcendental meditators. Lee’s contact was the press officer of the operation, a young German baron, gracious and eager to introduce her to the spokesman for His Holiness, not so keen on the possibilities of a meeting with the Maharishi himself.

“You will please, this afternoon attend darshan. After that, we will talk more. Come. You must rest from your journey."

They were assigned a simple room in a private house, all the town’s public accommodations having been filled with young Europeans and Americans who spent their time meditating in their rooms, coming out only for meals and for darshan, the sessions when the Maharishi sat on a deerskin, surrounded by flowers, answering questions and leading group meditations.

As Lee and Joe were escorted to front row seats by the baron, the Maharishi beamed at Lee, pressed his palms together, and nodded. “Jai guru dev jai guru dev jai guru dev."

She returned the little man’s gesture and looked her question to the baron, who whispered that he would explain, later.

“Maharishi, you have said that anyone who meditates will become better at what he does. But what if the person is a thief?" Lee turned to see that the Scandinavian-accented question was from a tall blonde in a sari.

The guru seemed pleased, a star batter swinging at a home-run pitch. “To be a better thief is no longer to be a thief." The assemblage laughed quietly.

“Maharishi, there is criticism in the press, especially in this Catholic country, that the west has its own religions, that Eastern religions are not needed here. How do you answer those critics?" The questioner was a teenaged boy who spoke with the hard r’s and flat a’s of Chicago. “How do I answer my parents?"

There was louder laughter and what felt like a collective leaning forward. The tiny dark-skinned man in white robes, surrounded by pale Western faces, was silent a moment. He was not, Lee thought, looking for an answer but considering how much to say of what he was thinking.

“Western religions teach, Be good and you will see God." Another silence. “It is very difficult to be good." The listeners murmured their agreement. “Eastern religions show you God." A small smile and a twinkle. “It is then quite difficult to be bad."

Lee took in a gulp of air at the realization that this might be the truest thing she had ever heard. The glowing place of rightness that she entered with her mantra was affecting everything, making it easier to do what was right to do, even when she was frightened. Joe too was seeing God and it had become difficult to be that other Joe. Not impossible, she realized, just difficult. But with more meditation, more time with God, it might become impossible.

After more questions and answers that she missed in her thoughts about the effects of seeing God, the Maharishi led a meditation and then was escorted away. The young German began to talk about arranging a meeting with Jimmy, the Maharishi’s Number One. She touched his arm. “That was the deepest I’ve ever gone in a meditation. Is it him or being with all these people? Or was it what he said—about seeing God?"

“It was perhaps all those things. Perhaps it was also that he was giving you a special blessing. I have never heard him greet anyone as he greeted you."

“All that jaigurudeving? He could have been greeting a TM baby. This prgenancy started the week after we began meditating." She began to say that meditating seemed to have been the key, but seeing Joe’s frown she decided not to give the wise little man any credit there.

That evening they joined Jimmy and the rest of the inner circle for dinner at Jimmy’s villa, a lovely old place with exquisite tile floors and a courtyard filled with flowers tumbling out of pots and boxes and beds. Clearly Jimmy, a balding American in a business suit, was one important fellow in this realm.

The Maharishi, Jimmy reported, would like to talk with her in Boston in July. Would she be available? Everyone seemed to think this was marvelous. But she had already come to Fiuggi. Ah, but Thursday, tomorrow, was a regular day of silence for everyone, and His Holiness had decided to stay in silence himself for the next six weeks.

Joe immediately began to negotiate with Jimmy, asking if a large donation would get the guru to look at Lee’s proposal now.

“He doesn’t have to look. He says she’s the right person to do the book. I’m to give you the addresses and phone numbers of any transcendental meditators you would like to interview and he’s recommended several well known people who might be very interesting to readers."

Joe began to say more but Lee thanked Jimmy warmly and tugged Joe toward the buffet.

“I bring you half way around the world and the little creep stiffs us? I don’t believe it."

“No, no, really, I’ve got what I wanted. Without talking to him. In Boston, I’ll interview him and ask him to write a foreword." She surveyed the impressive array of vegetarian dishes, spooned pasta in a green sauce on Joe’s plate and her own. “Lovely. It’s basil. Mmm and garlic. Smell."

While Joe read through Jimmy’s magazines, Lee talked with a rock guitarist from Belfast, a French nuclear physicist and Bunny, a short, graying heiress who would be hosting the Maharishi in Boston. Bunny had already decided which of the 14 bedrooms in her house would be Lee’s. It was all set.
Lee approached the most exotic person present, a tall brown woman swathed in bright colors and patterns, from her wrapped head to the belled hems of her silk palazzo pants. She was, Lee discovered, an American dancer named Jamuna, now the Maharishi’s driver. Best of all, she had been in a road company of Boobs and was delighted to share stories about Marshall Poole as she and Lee ate peanut butter cookies and sipped cardamom tea.

When Lee and Joe began making their good-nights, Bunny and Jamuna stopped them.

“You have a car here?" Jamuna was talking very quietly.

“Yes, of course."

“No one has cars here," Bunny whispered. “Except Maharishi. Are you going back to Rome tomorrow?"

After months in Fiuggi, the women couldn’t take another silent Thursday if playing in Rome was a possibility. With the boss going into seclusion, and having no need for his driver, they figured they could get away with a quick disappearance. The tiny Maserati, they insisted, was not a problem.

“We’re both very skinny." Jamuna pressed the volumes of cloth close to her sides to demonstrate. Bunny, all bones in her trim gabardine pants suit, laughed. “We’ll fit quite easily behind the seats."

Joe agreed graciously, pleased, Lee thought, to aid and abet in the breaking of some of the “little creep’s" rules. He would have the hotel make up two beds in the sitting room of their suite. No problem. They were his guests.

After breakfast the next morning, the two women wedged themselves, knees up, behind the Maserati’s seats, keeping their heads down until the car was well out of town.

Bunny and Jamuna knew a different Rome than Lee’s. Joe bowed out, leaving the three females to giggle their way through facials and shampoos at Elizabeth Arden, lunch at the Hassler, a sweep through the city’s most elegant shops, and a visit to a gypsy fortune teller Jamuna swore had saved her life. The dancer showed Lee an oddly marked amulet that the gypsy had given her, pulling it from the array of beads and scarves that swathed her neck above the sweeping, silk body draperies that fluttered around her when she walked.

Her head wrapped in purple, orange and red twists of cloth, her face broad and brown and beautiful, Jamuna was a literal traffic-stopper in Rome. Drivers hung out of car windows, veering toward oncoming trucks, causing much screeching of brakes. Cars waiting at red lights did not move after she floated past them and the light turned green.

On the narrow sidewalk that led to the gypsy’s house in Trastevere, the women walked Indian file, Lee bringing up the rear. A chubby bald man stepped into the street to let them pass and stared open-mouthed at Jamuna. As Lee passed him he was murmuring in wonderment, “Que bella negra!"

Jamuna reported to the bleached-blonde fortune teller that she’d been wearing the amulet as directed. Was she out of danger? The woman looked into her client’s teacup, studying the leaves intently.

“The evil forces have retreated but they are not gone. You will wear the amulet for three more months, but its powers must be restored."

For the payment of a great many lire, she would give Jamuna the needed instructions.

Lee was disappointed that the woman hadn’t asked that her palm be crossed with silver. When Jamuna handed over the bills, the gypsy wrote something on a small piece of paper. “Here, signorina. At midnight at next dark moon, two nursing women must sit back to back, one looks north, one looks south. They must each put milk in silver cup. You must put amulet into cup and say words on paper."

Jamuna, as nonchalant as if she’d just been given directions to the super market, pocketed the note and thanked the gypsy graciously.

“Bunny, don’t you have something to ask—about that problem on the Cape?" Bunny, in the dark suit and pearls of a proper Backbay matriarch, shifted uncomfortably on the hard kitchen chair. “Oh my goodness. I can’t think of a thing."

Jamuna turned to Lee, who shrugged, palms up. The gypsy stood to show them out, then looked intently at Lee.

“Boys. I see three boys, three men."

Back on Vittorio Veneto, Jamuna and Bunny introduced Lee to Café Hag, the first coffee Lee had drunk since learning she was pregnant. “Makes me too jumpy so it can’t be good for the baby and Sanka is disgusting, so I just gave it up." But Café Hag was both decaffeinated and delicious. Lee sipped and puzzled over the gypsy’s words. What did three boys and three men mean?

“You better figure it out, girl. That woman knows her business." Jamuna’s evidence was that the unseen evil forces had still not shown themselves in her life.

Lee thought that was kin to being grateful elephants hadn’t flattened your house in Cleveland. Joe did not want a boy. This baby was Kate and that gypsy was full of crap.

“Lee, promise you won’t ever tell Maharishi we went to a fortune teller. He would be just furious." Bunny seemed sincerely concerned. Lee responded, trying to be as serious, that she couldn’t imagine the subject ever coming up. Although if Jamuna managed to get two mothers milking at the next dark of the moon, the news just might get to him along the grapevine.

Snipped here: a description of the return drive to Fiuggi and some fabulous adventures in Italy—they don’t include the Maharishi so I cut them for this piece.
~~~
“Guess who’s meditating? Stefan!" Celeste, resplendent in fuschia pallazo pants and a purple jacket, giggled with delight as she hugged Lee and Joe at the Newark arrivals gate.

Joe stepped back from her embrace, frowning. “Where’s Das? He was supposed to pick us up. In our car."

“Oh, he’s outside waiting for you. But I just had to come and welcome you home and tell you the good news. Lee, you look fabulous."

“I love your news. Stefan meditating. That’s fabulous."

She would wait for their real conversation, for their inevitable phone connection to hear the real story, to ask how Celeste had managed to get Stefan to a TM meeting, to find out if he’d changed yet, as Joe had.

She would tell Celeste about the Good Joe who stayed present throughout the trip, if you didn’t count one bout of silent rage, and a few narrowly averted bad moments. Not once had he broken something, or threatened to fire her from her job as Signora Montagna.

Later, on the phone, she would tell Celeste what the Maharishi had said about seeing God and how much easier it would now be for Stefan to be good.

~~~

Lee eased quietly across thick Persian carpets in the massive, dark bedroom with the stunning view of blue water and gently gliding sails. Bunny’s grand old house on Marblehead Neck had emptied out, the Maharishi being off somewhere in Boston, Bunny and all the other house guests drawn along in his wake, every Chosen One determined to stay as close as possible to the Master. Still, Lee moved carefully, listening for sounds that would propel her instantly out of this room, the guru’s private space.
She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, some clue perhaps to who the renowned yogi was and what he was really up to, if that was not, as he said, the bringing of the dharma to the west, a gift, no strings, no hidden agendas.

She knew that he was bringing her the only calm times in her life, the daily sessions when she stepped away from any fear and anger, the times when Kate stopped tumbling and, with her, became peaceful. Lee was sure those moments of the days made it possible for her to do her best in all the others.

Snipped some plotting here—also not about Maharishi.

The previous evening, grateful for a breeze moving across Bunny’s park-sized lawn and onto the broad, roofed porch that encircled the house, Lee had been escorted to a wicker chair next to one in which the great little man sat, smiling. He had surprisingly expansive answers to all her questions about meditation and its effects, seemingly enjoying himself. When she came to the end of her questions, she closed her notebook and eased forward in her chair, thanking him for his time. He stopped her with his voice.
“You must prepare yourself for great changes that will not be easy for you. As they unfold, know that you are strong."
Of course. She was clearly adding an infant to her busy life. Still, she thought it kind of him to be so personal. He held his palms together, jaigurudeving her as she made way for the next seeker.

She looked around his room now for signs of his occupancy. There seemed to be none. No robe across a chair, no books or magazines on the tables, no papers or trinkets or personal effects of any kind.

She opened the closet and found only a row of handsome wooden hangers that bore no clothing. The drawers of an early colonial highboy held nothing but pomanders and lining paper.

The room was dominated by a canopied bed, a bed so high that three steps stood at each side to allow any occupants to reach the mattress. The linens were so startlingly white in this room of muted rugs and mellow wallpaper that Lee guessed they were all newly bought, for the Maharishi’s visit. She stepped into the bathroom and found there stacks of new thick towels and washcloths, all equally white.
The man wore only white. Maybe there was some rule that colors could not touch his skin. Maybe cloth that had touched other bodies could not touch his, so all linens had to be new. Maybe he didn’t require any of this and it was just Bunny and the other devotees knocking themselves out, hoping to please him.

At the bottom of the steps on one side of the bed, a pair of worn leather sandals was neatly aligned. Lee put a foot beside them and saw that they would be too small for her, wondered if the owner had gone off this morning shoeless, or perhaps owned two pair, a shocking excess.

Her eyes moved to the bedside table where a fat, tattered, hand-sized notebook sat next to a phone. It was undeniably personal and much used. She took a deep breath and opened it.

Page after page held names and numbers, country and city codes for people all over the world, each one entered in a small careful hand, the tidy effect spoiled by indecipherable notes that ran up the sides and at angles across each sheet. Paper notes were tucked everywhere, making the book bulge, its cut edge a full inch thicker than its spine. Lee turned the pages gently, making sure nothing fell out.

What would she say about this in her book about meditators? Nothing. She was not supposed to have such a thing in her hands. And the only question most readers would want answered was What are the Beatles’ phone numbers? Not something she would print, though she smiled, seeing several numbers by the name George Harrison, along with more of the Hindi notations. The guru’s notes to himself about this most spiritual of the Fab Four?

The phone rang, shrill in the silence, the sound of the outside world catching Lee in the act. She stared at it, wondering if the caller would know what extension was being picked up. Of course he/she wouldn’t. She lifted the receiver.

“Hello?"

“Oh thank goodness. I was afraid you’d be napping. Lee, darling, you’ve got to rally the pundits."

“OK, Bunny. And what am I rallying them for?"

“We’re at MIT in a computer lab. They’re letting Maharishi play with some contraption that does a visual printout of sounds. And he wants the pundits to come and chant into it."

“All right. What time do they need to be there?"

“Soon. It’s a half-hour drive, so get them organized and come along as soon as you can."

Lee wrote down Bunny’s directions for driving from Marblehead Neck to MIT, studied a map in the glove compartment of the minibus in the carriage house, revved the engine and pulled it out onto the gravel. At least six Indian monks were ensconced in the rooms above the cars. Being female, she could not enter their quarters to discuss her mission with them, which left her standing under the windows, wondering how to get their attention. Ahoy, pundits! did not seem respectful.

“Uhh, halloo? Gentlemen?"

She considered looking in the house for a dinner bell, but settled on calling up to the windows again.

“Maharishi says ‘Come now.’"

Discerning no movement or sound in the rooms, she considered barging in, rules or no rules. How good were these holy men at being celibate if they couldn’t handle being in the same room with a woman? Especially a big unsexy pregnant one? Maybe none of them spoke English and she was just making unintelligible noises. Maybe she’d have to use the Harpo approach and honk the horn.

The door at the bottom of the stairway opened and a round brown man with a walking staff stepped into the courtyard, smiling broadly. Lee opened the door of the little bus and, with a gesture, invited him to board. Six more Indians in white togas followed him at a sprightly pace, settling quickly into the seats of the bus, looking forward expectantly.

One way or another, she would deliver them to the boss. She just had to drive this thing into and across Boston although she’d never driven a minibus before and didn’t know Boston from Buenos Aires. But she’d studied a map, and she thought she had the gears figured out. She nodded to the pundit beside her and turned the ignition key.

Lee hadn’t calculated on the mental insularity of Marblehead Neck, the inability of highway engineers to communicate, nor on the madness of Boston drivers. The tiny island was hosting an enormous number of sailboats for a week of racing, but none of the boats must be manned by strangers—or they had all arrived by sea rather than land; signage was cryptic or nonexistent and Lee circled the island twice before finding the way off it to Marblehead proper. It was, she decided, like the price of a yacht—if you had to ask, you’d disqualified yourself. People on Marblehead Neck didn’t need signage to know where they were going.
Lee had memorized the major turns she needed to make, knew she had to bear west and southwest. Which made things dicey when signs with the right road names on them also carried the words north or east. She considered handing the map to the round brown fellow in the passenger seat but was deterred by the fact that he had said not a word to her and had looked neither left nor right but only directly ahead, since taking his seat.

Somehow the van arrived in center-city Boston, which Lee verified when they passed, as promised, City Hall Square. Every narrow, lumpy street in the city was filled with manic drivers, two of whom almost sideswiped the van as they darted through traffic at astonishing speeds. Once a Plymouth blowing off a red light would have rammed the bus broadside if Lee hadn’t slammed on the brakes, sending the pundits into tumbles of togas on the floor. Frozen in a sound wash of blasting horns demanding that she move on, Lee was astonished to find her arm in front of the passenger-seat pundit, protecting him from the dashboard. She checked her passengers, found them all back in their seats, smiling, totally unperturbed.

They were unshaken by the several near collisions, by the repetitions of passing landmarks as she struggled her way through the maze of narrow streets, by the godawful heat that had Lee drenched and sticking to the seat.

As they pulled up in front of the right hall at MIT, the pundit beside her turned to Lee and smiled. “Thank you, Mrs. Smashing fine day. Like Calcutta." There wasn’t a bead of moisture on him.

Lee gave him the hall name and room number and watched the group file toward what was probably the right building before setting off to find a parking place that would accommodate the minibus.

The half-hour journey had taken more than three times that. But the Maharishi was unperturbed, delightedly cueing the pundits into song at microphones on lab tables. When the printed patterns their voices generated were handed to them, they laughed like little boys, enchanted with this wondrous new toy.

Lee stayed on the edges of the spectators, not wanting to catch the Maharishi’s attention. She didn’t want to be identified now as the person who couldn’t handle such a simple task as delivering the pundits on time. This was no time for fouling up. In the weeks ahead she had a book to start and a baby to finish and Joe was going to be no help with any of it—she was on her own.

12 January 2008

Race, Gender & Class in Twenty Aught Eight

Old feminist here, contemporary of Steinem’s,* and one who wishes all young women grokked how different life was for us back in the day, how much they owe the women’s movement, how precarious the changes are that make their current opportunities seem givens--and permanent.

*Full disclosure: Steinem wrote a great blurb for a book of mine and I’ve admired her enormously for 40 years.

I’d like to believe the Gen Y rebuttals of her pro-Hillary OpEd. I’d like to believe our society is so far past gender and race prejudices that we can ignore them in this election year. But you know, all the “We’re past that" pieces I’ve read have been by young women of the “We’ve made it" class.

Spending time as I do in worlds other than that one, I don’t believe it for a minute. In the blue-collar world, in the world of conservative Christians, and among many of the military, “Iron my shirt" isn’t an unreasonable order. It’s the way things have been and ever shall be. The last four decades have only pissed them off, not changed their core beliefs.

In that other world I frequent, a man can see a daughter through long years of education to a great job she couldn’t have gotten in 1970 and he can still call feminism a scourge on humanity. The human mind can make some amazingly curlicued turns.

If we stopped thinking that People Like Us, people with degrees and desk jobs and lots of books at home were the norm, we wouldn’t be so shocked when 51% of the votes in an election make no sense to us.

Race and gender are not off the table when these Americans vote. Sorry, kids, it just ain’t so.

That said, I’ve personally gone past a time when gender or race alone could determine my vote. (I have a degree, a desk job, and lots of books at home.)

I haven’t been a fan of either Clinton--see reasons abounding at The Progressive Review—the cache there of Clinton gotchas are ripe for Republican oppo teams salivating for a Clinton candidacy.

And I am far too alarmed by the corporate highjacking of this country to believe Obama’s Let’s all be nice has a chance in hell of stopping them.

Jim Hightower has opined that Left/Right isn’t the point--it’s Up/Down. Despite being more up than down (I see myself as broke, not poor), I’m with Jim. The chasm between rich and poor in this country is appalling, and corporate greed is fueling the split.

The only voice I hear getting it right has a drawl and is coming out of a blue-eyed white guy. So I will take a pass this time on The First Woman President and The First Black President and keep plugging for John Edwards, because there’s nothing more important right now than reinstituting controls on the mega-corporations. If Teddy Roosevelt were running I’d be for him. How retro is that?

I do have a dream candidate for Twenty Aught Eight. I’d put race and gender in as positives, add a heart the size of the world, a voice thundering against injustice, a brain that’s firing on all cylinders—and there she is, a re-born Barbara Jordan, the First Black and the First Woman President of the United States, ready to kick corporate butt. Everything in one package. Perfect.

4 January 2008

On the Assassination of Pinky Bhuto

“They got Pinky!"

I was calling out to my husband after turning on the radio to news that Bhuto had been assassinated. No, we’re not among the seeming hundreds who are now writing about their personal relationships with her. We encountered her just once, in 1989. She was giving a commencement address and receiving an honorary LLD. Harvard was welcoming her home, with fond memories of the days when she’d been known to all there as Pinky.

I don’t even remember the speech. What I do remember is seeing her moving along a path in the Yard. Alone, small, beautiful, smiling, “Pinky" seemed enchanted to be back at this place where she’d come at 16, putting away the salwar kameez for sweatshirts and jeans. Now she’d been killed.

Public figures die all the time. Political leaders are assassinated. I had to understand why this feels so different to me.

I see that tiny, vulnerable woman, walking along a path in the Yard. A woman. That picture is quickly joined by one of a soldier crawling under live machine-gun fire as part of her basic training. Her basic training. She looked so small in the combat fatigues. Another image roars in, the Newsweek cover of a wounded Iraq-war veteran, a woman—with her legs blown off.

I’m embarrassed by the emotions all this evokes in me. Seeing any young person, male or female, in harm’s way triggers maternal alarm bells—gotta help, gotta protect. Girls or boys. I’ve raised sons. It is agony to see them in danger or pain.

But. Girls. Women. My emotional wiring may never adjust. No matter that it’s been decades. Over 20 years ago Indira Gandhi was gunned down. (Her son took her place, and shared her fate.) Women have been in combat now for years. And I’m still not armored against these realities.

As an early and heartfelt feminist, I knew this was coming, knew—still know—it is right and fair. If the women of the world are to have equal opportunities, we must also have equal responsibilities. Including that of serving in combat. Including becoming targets for assassins, if we take on great power. Why should men be the only ones to face such dangers? Unlock the doors and we’ll accept the consequences. It was a deal.

Thirty years on, young women soldiers lose limbs to IEDs and female aspirants to power--no matter how small and fragile--are shot. I understand. It’s just this mom thing that roars up in me and yells No! as I dive to snatch them all out of harm’s way. The girls. The boys. All of them, when their wild and precious lives are at risk.

May the deaths and maimings of our American daughters shock us into remembering how precious all our children’s lives are, never to be spent recklessly or venally. Our children are not cannon fodder. Not a single one of them, male or female. ###

Postscript: Now Pinky’s son has stepped into her shoes. Her boy. All of 19. Like so many a soldier—vulnerable, scared, brave. Oh damn. Somebody please be sure that kid has a first-rate security team.

2 December 2007

Joseph Campbell & Giraffes

I learned a lot about the power of heroes from the world’s favorite teller of heroes’ tales, Joseph Campbell.

Back when I was getting the Giraffe Project started, friends and family were asking why I was putting so much into something that could well be a lost cause. Flying off to Paris from my Manhattan base to write a speech for the Aga Khan hadn’t been a bad way to make a living. Why was I going on and on with this Giraffe-stick-your-neck-out thing, these stories about real people being heroic? I wasn’t sure myself.

I got the answer on a trip west, after driving John Graham from San Francisco to Esalen, where he was giving his Politics That Heal seminar, a precursor to the workshops he would do once he’d joined me in the Giraffe Project. I had planned to drive back up the coast and work through the weekend. But I saw that Campbell was there, also doing a seminar. Having interviewed him for an article and taken his courses at the Church of the Open Eye and the New School in Manhattan, I knew I’d get more out of staying than going. I chucked my work plans and stayed on for two and a half days of Joe-on-Parsifal.

Campbell tracked the Parsifal story as a recurring theme in mythology, the story of the Holy Fool. This Fool is always considered a dummy by the smart, hip people who really know the score. There’s a mysterious blight on the land, nothing will grow and no one knows how to break the spell. The Holy Fool sets out to find the cause, right the wrong, save the people. He’s told he can’t do it, that he’s too dumb, too weak, too something, hearing from all quarters, “That’s not how we do things here," and “You just don’t understand." But he goes ahead anyway.

Parsifal would break the curse on the people by finding the Holy Grail. In seeking it he “went into the dark forest, alone, at a place where there was no path," the defining journey, Campbell opined, of heroism in European mythology.

With sly humor, he told story after story of Holy Fools, and ended the weekend showing a slide of an ancient Tarot deck. Then he read a deck of modern playing cards as a spiritual journey through the suits, through the numbers and the face cards, to the Joker, descendant of the Tarot’s Fool.

The Fool is the most dangerous person on earth, Campbell explained, the most threatening to all hierarchical institutions, because he’s outside the suits, outside the numbers, beyond the powers of the royal cards. He has no wealth--see the hobo’s stick over his shoulder. He has no concern for naysayers--see the dogs nipping at his heels, and how he’s ignoring them. He’s about to walk over a cliff--see how unconcerned he is.

No one has power over this being. He’s not limited by his limitations, not listening to reason, not stoppable, not controllable. He knows what he has to do and he’s doing it, no matter what.

Campbell was--as he always was in person--brilliant, funny, irreverent and charming. We talked with him before turning in at night, all of us watching the Big Sur surf crash onto the magnificent shoreline below our rooms. We delighted at meal times in watching him tweak the live-sprout eaters with his opinion that the perfect meal was a rare steak and a bottle of whiskey. “There’s a reason hard liquor is called ‘spirits,’ you know."

Driving back up the coast Sunday night, I had what now seems an obvious revelation--the reason I had been so obsessed with finding the heroes I called Giraffes and telling their stories was that these were our time’s Holy Fools; I had locked into an archetype that had me in thrall, one that was desperately needed in the spiritual blight of these times. No matter what it took, I would go on.

Back in New York, I had lunch with Campbell and told him what I was doing, what his seminar had made clear to me, how grateful I was that he’d shown me the reason for my obsession. I was amazed to see his eyes well up, and delighted to have his endorsement of my work, the work I’m still doing, a couple of decades down the road.

18 November 2007

Our Little Lives & the Big Picture

Friend of mine, a fellow writer, put the question to his email network last week: Would anyone join him in a hunger strike for the closing of Guantanamo?

He figures we have to do something to keep the Administration from destroying everything this country should stand for. Life’s been pretty tough for him lately and he’s decided he’d rather go out fighting for something big rather than being quietly done in by his malfunctioning body.

Talk about putting it right in your lap. I had to think long and hard about that one.

I couldn’t agree more that we have to do something. And I don’t think anything I’ve done so far means a damned thing to this Administration, so he might be right that to-the-death hunger strikes are the next logical step.

Millions of us across the world marched to stop the invasion of Iraq. Minor annoyance—perhaps—to Bush/Cheney, but we didn’t even delay the attack, much less stop it.

I marched with labor unions at the WTO protests in Seattle. The agreements went right ahead and are doing exactly what the unions said they would do—erase US blue collar jobs.

I’ve made campaign calls for Congressional candidates, pressed everyone I know to vote, written compelling messages to legislators. And Congress is still letting the Constitution be subverted.

Cheney/Bush have been quite unimpressed with my/your efforts. I suspect that if a few of us publicly starved ourselves to death in protest against their most impeachable actions, their only reaction—if they noticed—would be mild pleasure. Fewer kooks mouthing off. What could be bad about that?

My friend sent out the responses he got from writers all over the country. One urged him to stay alive and in the best possible health so he could keep doing the mouthing off. One signed on, even said he had a boat they could use to anchor off Guantanamo. He’d decided that his almost-80 years were enough. The rest of us said No thanks.

There’s this problem a lot of us have—we like our little lives. In the big picture, things are going to hell in that hand basket. But in the micro, I’ve got this book I’m working on and it’s going pretty good. I recently found a longlost son and I’m having a grand time getting to know him and his family. The view of the Olympic Mountains from my window still gives me goosebumps. A medical scare turned out to be a false alarm, leaving me in good health and high spirits. There’s a Mozart concerto playing across the room and it’s gorgeous. In my day job, my estimable mate and I are making progress in getting people to become engaged citizens.

And here I am saying that I am not “engaged" enough to give up my little life in hopes of stopping the public villains I so oppose.

In hopes. There’s the sticking point. I’m banging pots and pans, Molly Ivins, like you said we must. Encouraging the moves toward impeachment, sending my little checks to candidates who speak for honorable public policies, for the people and against corporate greed.

I’ll get back on the phone, go back into the streets, keep blogging. “In hopes" that maybe, just maybe, we’ll manage an honest election next year and turn these unAmerican lunatics out of power.

I know I’m walking a line here. It’s the one too many people walked too long in Germany as the Fascists drove them straight toward the cliff.

I’m gambling that we still have a chance to put the country back on an honorable course—with our votes instead of our lives.

But if we’re faced on November 5, 2008 with President-elect Giuliani…. OK friend, maybe that’s when my little life goes on the table. But for now, I’ll keep banging them pots—in hopes.

13 November 2007

Chief Seattle's Screenwriter

With a strike of movie and television writers roaring along, this bit of Giraffe Project history seems worth revisiting--

CHIEF SEATTLE'S SCREENWRITER

It isn’t what the Chief had in mind, I’m sure, but over the years he’s acquired a couple of ghost writers--one poet/physician and one screenwriter.

The gorgeous environmental speech that is everywhere attributed to the nineteenth-century tribal leader was, in fact, written by screenwriter Ted Perry in 1971. And Perry based his script on the work of a Dr. Henry Smith, who probably made up a good bit of it.

Surprised? So were we. The Giraffe Heroes Project published the full text of the speech, which is seldom seen, as the back cover of our newsletter. Then John De Graaf, the filmmaker who wrote and produced a public television documentary on our work, called and said, “Guess what?" He’d learned the truth while working on a documentary about Chief Seattle’s people—what remains of them. Paula Wissel of KPLU public radio did a report for NPR’s Morning Edition that told the nation the real story.

Still the myth persists.

Here’s how it all came about~

In December 1854 Chief Seattle made an impassioned speech in his own language, Duwamish. He and other tribal leaders were meeting with the Territorial Governor, who was pressing them to sign away their lands in exchange for protection on a reservation.

Dr. Henry Smith was present and took notes, which he wrote up 33 years later and sent to a Seattle paper. In 1854, Dr. Smith had been in the area only a year and one suspects his Duwamish may have been a little spotty. He was also know to be a poet in his non-medical hours and the Duwamish were plain, unflowery speakers, so the one eye-witness account of the speech is highly suspect.

Ted Perry heard Smith’s account read at an Earth Day gathering in 1970, when he was planning a film on the environment. He decided he would write a script in which a fictitious Native American called for environmental responsibility.

Perry told us that he’d mentioned Chief Seattle as his inspiration for the script when he turned it over to the producer. The script also mentioned the Chief by name, which Perry sees in retrospect as a “terrible idea, although at the time it seemed innocent enough. If I had been writing a play I wouldn’t think twice about having a fictional Abraham Lincoln say things I wrote, expecting that the audience could figure out from the ‘Written by Ted Perry’ that the words were not actually those of Abraham Lincoln."

But when the film aired on ABC in 1972, the producer had given Perry no on-screen credit. Perry protested; the producer said the words sounded “more authentic" presented as Chief Seattle’s.

Since then, to his great embarrassment, Perry has seen the speech quoted by Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller and hundreds of lesser-known people like you and me. It’s been used in songs, oratorios, even on zoo cages.

“One time I had it read to me at church as the sermon of the day," Perry lamented.

He says that Giraffe Hero John Seed got the story right in his book Thinking Like a Mountain and that, “for years I have been telling the truth about the text at every opportunity." Still, he describes himself as cringing at his role in the misattribution.

But when you think about it, the producer was right. How many of us would have put a quote from a guy who teaches film at Middlebury College on our refrigerators or office walls or magazine pages? But what fine and true words they are. It’s time we thanked Mr. Perry. Here, for your posting, are his most famous words:

“The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.
All things are connected, like the blood which unites one family. Mankind did not weave the web of life.
We are but one strand within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves."
—Ted Perry

12 November 2007

Writers' Cause Well Described

Over at Huffington Post, where my blogs get more eyes, one reader left me this url--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a37uqd5vTw

It's a wonderfully written piece about the writers' strike.

Writers' Cause Well Described

Over at Huffington Post, where my blogs get more eyes, one reader left me this url--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a37uqd5vTw

It's a wonderfully written piece about the writers' strike.

11 November 2007

Somebody Wrote That

“Somebody wrote that."

Three words, five syllables, a theme of the Writers’ Guild of America. They’re the perfect words for sending this writer’s fist straight into the air with a fervent Yes!

I just heard someone say, after a report on the Guild’s strike, “I’m against strikes." Well, as a progressive, I am for many a strike and as a writer, I am wholeheartedly for this one.

The corporate owners of film studios, television networks and DVD distribution networks are boasting of record profits at the same time that they’re stiffing writers, the seeds of their wealth.

The only chip that writers have in this game is to put their pencils down and let the suits see how they like trying to make a buck without them.

Our everyday language is full of words that bring actors’ faces and voices to mind—not those of writers. But when we say—
“You ain’t seen nuthin yet"
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn"
“Here’s looking at you, kid"
“I am shocked, shocked!"
"I’ll be back"
“You can’t handle the truth"
“Houston, we have a problem"
“Snap out of it!" or
“Show me the money"—
we’re not quoting actors. Somebody wrote that—an invisible writer who’s not making a dime out of the ongoing profits from the stories, characters and dialogue they created.

Go strikers!

13 October 2007

Necks Out, Chins Up

The below post is also at www.giraffe.org/blog/ where the software also allows Comments, something that isn't possible here. Yet. If you'd like to get into the conversation, click over to the blog at Giraffe.

It’s interesting to be in the work of fostering citizen courage in this time when a growing national theme seems to be, Be afraid. Be very afraid.

“Interesting" is of course sarcasm. What I’m really feeling is anger.

Are you listening to our “leaders"? To people seeking higher office? To political pundits? To newscasters? A fat percentage of what too many of them say is fear-mongering.

If you’re watching/listening/reading—and you’re gullible—there’s a terrorist in your personal future. He’s busy at the moment planting IEDs in the Green Zone, but he’ll be here, out to get your mama, if we don’t keep him busy in Iraq. Hordes of his fellow fanatics are trying to sneak onto your airplane flight. And there’s a sleeper cell around the corner from you, hatching plots and bombs. This time they’re going to take out your house.

Go to any airport in this country and you’ll see how well our government is dealing with the terrible danger you’re in. TSA staffers are wanding 90-year-old ladies in wheelchairs, and burrowing through their suitcases. Toddlers are on the no-fly list. Lipsticks are confiscated. It’s all done with the highest seriousness.

It’s a show of protection and it stirs the fear pot, giving us over and over an image of being in grave personal peril, needing Big Brother to make sure we’re safe.

Here are stats on some things that actually killed American civilians between 1995 and 2005. You could call it a National Terror Alert Reality Check, and add colors at will for each level of risk:

SEVERE
Driving off the road: 254,419
Falling: 146,542
Accidental poisoning: 140,327

HIGH
Dying from work: 59,730
Walking down the street: 52,000
Accidental drowning: 38,302

ELEVATED
The flu: 19,415
Hernias: 16,742

GUARDED
Accidental gunshot: 8,536
Accidental electrocution: 5,171

LOW
Being shot by a police officer: 3,949
Terrorism: 3,147
Carbon monoxide in products: 1,554

I’m seeing pale blue or pink as the appropriate color for the risk level of dying from terrorism.

(All those repeats of “accidental" seem to be ruling out murders by the same means. Anybody got the stats on murders in those years?)

I want to tell the fear-mongers that we’re more than 16 times more likely to die walking down the street than at the hands of a terrorist. But I suspect they know that.

Instilling fear in the populace is a fine tool for control. The unspoken subtext is, “Let us do whatever we want to the Constitution, let us start wars wherever it suits us, let us have your kids to send into the meat grinder—because we’re protecting you from Big Bad Wolves."

Actually, real protections are about as common as real assistance to post-Katrina New Orleans. American undercover teams carrying weapons have tested security at airport after airport, including one used by the actual highjackers—the teams have never been detected, much less stopped. Similar teams have gotten into nuclear power plants. Emergency services still can’t cross-communicate on their networks, as the 9/11 Commission insisted they must. And every hour containers pile up in our ports, unexamined, containing who knows what.

Instead of working seriously on these things that could really help, we get the wanding of grammaw.

I see malfeasance in such security farces while invisible, necessary actions go undone. I see malfeasance in the insult to our national dignity of so much pandering to primitive, monster-in-the-closet fear.

Hey. This is the Home of the Brave. Good leaders would be reminding us of that, not treating us like frightened children. Instead, too many of our so-called leaders—and I mean that across party lines–are aligning with the goal of the terrorists—to scare Americans spitless.

QED: fear-mongering is aiding and abetting the enemy.

Here’s one citizen who won’t play. I’m not scared and you shouldn’t be either. We can stick our necks out and our chins up. We’re tough, strong people, and we’re not afraid.

But angry? Oh yeah. Be angry. Be very angry.

22 September 2007

Me & Ken Burns--Looking at WWII

Listening to interviews with Ken Burns about his WWII documentary (it starts tomorrow night on PBS) I've been drop-kicked into my own memories of those years. Burns has interviewed vets about their experiences--I don't know if he's included anyone who was a kid then, as I was.

Children were witnessing the adult drama of it all. A third-grader when it started, I was also waging my own "war effort." It was deeply magical thinking--I really thought what I did or didn't do could save lives, win battles, bring my dad and uncles home safe. And conversely, that if I screwed up, they were all in greater danger. Quite a mix of guilt, love and wildly inflated Responsibility.

So as part of what I hope is a national experience--all of us watching this new telling of the WWII story—here are pages from a novel that seems to be a permanent lifework for me. Someday I'll actually finish it, but for now, for this time of looking at that long-ago war, here are some experiences of one serious kid who was deeply marked by those years.

FOR THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEA

The war was not going well. In the newspapers, in LIFE, in the Saturday Evening Post, there were stories and pictures of defeat, of death marches, and of sinking ships.

Her father’s ship had burned at Pearl Harbor, one of the ones billowing black smoke in all the newsreels as Roosevelt’s voice declared war on the Japanese. Chief Warrant Officer Ernest Palmer had been on shore leave when it happened, home with his wife and children on Coronado, an island in San Diego harbor that was half navy base and airfield, half charming civilian town filled with Navy families. But they had not seen him since voices on the radio had ordered all military personnel to report immediately to their ships and bases. Buses moved slowly along San Diego’s palm-lined streets, loudspeakers blaring, stopping at corners to pick up every uniformed man in that town filled with uniforms.

Commissioned as a line officer and reassigned to another ship, Ensign Palmer had flown to Pearl, where the ships were burning, where the Japanese might land troops, where Lee knew that Navy friends had been killed in their backyards and in their cars by strafing planes.

San Diego harbor, normally filled with great warships, had emptied out, the carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers steaming past Point Loma and into the Pacific, leaving the harbor bereft, the city unguarded, vulnerable.

She sat with her mother and her baby brother in their green stucco cottage with the drapes drawn over the closed wooden blinds and a blanket shielding one small lamp. There must be no light to guide enemy pilots to the North Island base, or to this fragment of a family, sitting stunned in the Stateside town nearest to Hawaii.

In the long months after that, Pete, the too-old-to-be-drafted mailman, became the most important human on Coronado Island, a modern Mercury, carrying messages to and from the war. Every day her mother had a letter ready for him to take, a letter that smelled always of the sweet peas she grew, picking each day just one to send into the war. Most days the letters she received were things she shuffled quickly through and dropped unopened on a chair or the kitchen counter. And Lee would find her mother listening to songs from the radio like “I’ll Be Seeing You" or “When the Lights Go On Again," as she mended Ernie’s clothes or grated American cheese into macaroni, and quietly wept.

Then there would be a day when Pete—Mr. Cameron to Lee—came down the walk beaming, and Mrs. Palmer would run into the house with a stack of tiny V-mails, sorting them out to read in order, one for each day that had passed since the last batch that had come. But the sad songs on the radio still made her cry.

Drawers full of V-mails later, one came that said, “I’ve decided to shave my mustache next month, maybe before Halloween" and, “Why don’t you and the kids go see Liz and Danny Bailey for your birthday?" Since Mrs. Palmer hated mustaches and her husband always grew one at sea and the Baileys lived in San Francisco and her birthday was in late October, she knew what to do. The Delius was coming home.

In the next few weeks, Lee worried about her mother’s behavior. Posters everywhere warned that a slip of the lip could sink a ship, and there her mother was, not saying anything exactly, but laughing too much and arranging for a friend to weed the victory garden when they would be away, buying makeup and perfume that she didn’t open and making a lot of new clothes that she didn’t wear. She stood in lines for stockings and had four pairs in packages on her dresser, 54 gauge, 15 denier, but she kept painting on leg makeup. She made an awful suit with big shoulders that she told Lee she would need for going out in San Francisco, which was an elegant city, almost Eastern. Then she made a red silk blouse with no back and a black satin skirt that she didn’t sew up one side, and she didn’t tell Lee what that was for.

Lee was sure her mother was a security risk. The woman didn’t seem to understand that the Delius was a mother ship, a submarine tender, the rallying point for subs that would leave her to move below the surface of the Pacific, on the prowl for enemy battleships and carriers to sink. Sink the Delius and you’d cripple the sub fleet. The enemy must not know that the tender was headed toward San Francisco.

Lee tried to make amends for her mother by doubling her red-wagon rounds of the neighborhood, collecting coffee cans full of used cooking grease, clattering piles of flattened tin cans and stacks of newspapers that left the dresses her mother made for her gray with ink. She pulled all of it dutifully, ritually to the corner gas station where she placed her offerings on the piles of precious junk that would be scooped up by trucks from the base for conversion into explosives and tank treads.

Saturday mornings she would walk to the shadowy junk store on Orange Avenue and trade Classic Illustrated comics with the owner, a fierce, white-haired woman who looked remarkably like the parrot that hung near the stacks of comic books, assailing Lee every week with, “Tell me a story! Tell me a story!" She would make her trade, a Count of Monte Cristo and a Last of the Mohicans for one Man in the Iron Mask and leave, getting quickly away from the Parrot Lady and her demanding bird.

The next stop was the 9-cent matinee at the Strand, hours of Abbott and Costello, Flash Gordon, and of Humphrey Bogart winning the war on land and sea. Sitting over a lemon phosphate at the drugstore counter after the show, she silently ran and re-ran images of ships with guns erupting fire clouds, ships lowering away lifeboats after being torpedoed, ships slipping under the seatop. She would not play in that sea, would not even walk on the beach, knowing that the water was filled with drowned men who might be her father.

On the days she deemed her war efforts worthy, he would be safe. She knew he was not in danger the week she hauled two threadbare tires to the rubber mountain at the service station, and one week when collections were slow, she carried over her new Magicskin doll, just to be sure. If she got the yellow dye squeezed evenly through the disgusting sack of white margarine, he was safe for at least a morning. When the practice air-raid sirens screamed and she ran home under the fragrant oleanders and eucalyptus, it meant that no planes were diving on his ship.

Their own little house was well protected; housing was impossible to find and families all over Coronado were taking in servicemen’s families. Her mother had moved out of the room with the double bed and into Ernie’s room, sleeping on a folding cot next to his crib so the most beautiful couple Lee had ever seen could move into her parents’ room—a tall Marine pilot based at North Island and his small blonde wife.

Mrs. Palmer was terribly upset when the pilot’s wife spilled a bottle of ink on her hand-crocheted bedspread, but Lee loved the days when the pilot swooped his F4U down over their tile roof and waggled its wings. If the Japs tried to hit Coronado as they had Pearl Harbor, the little house on C Street would have its own air defense.

The homefront blackouts and air raid practices were constant reminders to Emily Palmer that the war could come to Coronado at any time, could take her children’s lives, and her own. There were dangers everywhere—stories of bad men breaking into houses they knew were unprotected by resident males; Mrs. Palmer locked every door and window, checking them again and again. People got polio and went into iron lungs, if they lived. When there was news of an outbreak, Lee was not allowed to go to the Strand for her beloved matinees.

There was never enough money or ration points. Mrs. Palmer made all their clothes, grew vegetables in the victory garden, added more and more bread to the meatloaf, mended every tear, darned the holes in their socks. And waited for the mail.

During this super-dangerous time for her father, Lee stopped speaking to the Chinese kids who lived two houses away because they might really be Japanese who could send out Morse code reports on her mother’s revealing behavior, the stockpiled stockings and the industrious sewing of San Francisco clothes. Lee couldn’t be too careful.

The best insurance came at Sacred Heart, where Lee never missed a Saturday morning confession. She had sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed, through her fault, through her fault, through her most grievous fault, offending God in some way or another every perilous week. Amends had to be made. She used up most of her allowance on candles she lit at the feet of Our Lady of Guadalupe, blessed Mary ever Virgin, before kneeling to pray that the dirty Japs would not harm the valiant officers and men of the USS Delius.

Words kept coming into her mind from the song they sang at Navy ceremonies, a song that was not Catholic and so could not be sung here at Sacred Heart but it was beautiful and filled up her heart with just the words she wanted God to hear, even if they were Protestant—“Oh hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea."

Every couple in those war years must have had censor-beating codes— when the Delius made it safely into port, the crew’s wives and children were waiting for them. They had all beaten gas rationing or impossible crowds at train and bus stations to get there; civilians had no priority on travel space, the seats going first to the droves of military travelers.

Emily Palmer and her children had been lucky. Ernie Junior completely charmed a teen-aged sailor from Ohio who was waiting near them in the mob jamming San Diego’s Union Station. The toddler had been wearing the chubby sailor’s hat and getting romper fuzz all over his uniform for an hour before the train going north was finally announced and the sailor plunged into the crowd, carrying Ernie on his shoulders. Lee and Mrs. Palmer had tried to keep up but were held back by the solid press of bodies. Her mother was calling out to the sailor to stop and give her son back, but the sailor was already on the train steps, talking to the conductor and pointing to Lee and Mrs. Palmer. The conductor waved them through the crowd, to coach seats with Ernie and his friend. “I told him he had to let my wife and daughter aboard, too," he said with a pimply grin.

In San Francisco, Ernie and Lee stayed with Liz Bailey and her son Danny, who ignored Lee, as he always had in all the times their families had turned up on the same bases, once even sharing a house in Long Beach when their fathers both shipped out on the Mississippi.

There was nothing to do but read, help Mrs. Bailey in the kitchen and chase after Ernie so he didn’t get into trouble. “T-Bone" Bailey, like her own father a mustang officer now, which meant he used to be a sailor, was somewhere in the Pacific, on a battleship.

Lee wondered then about the names their fathers had been given by their shipmates. How did a person get to be called T-Bone? She knew they called her father “Deacon." She supposed her own name would be “Bookworm." And Danny’s would have to be “Stuckup."

There had been even more to fear during the war than Lee had imagined as she had made her collections, and lit her candles. Her father didn’t talk about it, but she learned from eavesdropping at the officers’ club that a kamikaze had hit the bridge, shells fired from a Japanese destroyer had torn open the forward bulkheads, and some of his friends had died. The part of the story that frightened her even more was the long, slow towing of the wounded Delius across the Pacific, all those days that her mother had been preparing for the ship’s arrival in San Francisco. Lee knew from the matinees how dangerous such a voyage was, and she wondered how the enemy ships and planes had missed such an opportunity to take advantage of helpless Yanks.

At a picnic for the crew and their families, her father and the skipper presented her with a bowl of polliwogs they said had gotten shell-shocked aboard the Delius. On the bowl there was a decal of the emblem Disney had drawn for the ship—Dolly Delius, a mermaid, surrounded by polliwogs. Lee didn’t think deadly submarines were darling polliwogs and a cute little mermaid certainly wasn’t dignified enough for the Delius’s solemn and dangerous role in the war. Saying none of that, she agreed to nurse the tiny creatures to a peaceful recuperation ashore. And deep into her life as an adult, Dolly Delius the mermaid still hung on the wall, wherever Lee lived.

Each day her parents became sadder, more distracted, as the ship came closer to leaving dry-dock, all repairs completed by round-the-clock shifts of shipyard workers. They sold gardenias on the streets of San Francisco then, from carts that perfumed the city air. Lee could see now the gold braid on her father’s sleeve as he pinned a gardenia to the broad shoulder of her mother’s suit. For the rest of Lee’s life the scents of sweetpeas and of gardenias would tip her instantly into being both the enchanted observer of her parents’ great love for each other and their excluded, incidental child. She could see them now, each fateful day quieter, until they were standing beside the re-floated ship and they were saying nothing at all.

Lee had not seen the Delius wounded, but now it loomed above her, whole and strong, a gray wall held taut to the pier with massive hawsers, the ship full of noise and movement and power, ready to go once more in harm’s way.

Dozens of families stood in its shadow, each one a tight cluster of colors around a single, dark uniform. The adults did not look at the ship and no one stood near the gangplank, where officers and men whose families were not there hurried aboard.

On the other side of the narrow dock, another ship waited, its gangway already pulled in, its decks lined with Marines in full battle dress, silently watching the scene below. No one was there to see them away. They had made their goodbyes in Idaho or Alabama or New Mexico and now stood and witnessed the undoing of the Delius’s ties to home.

No sun from the pale winter sky reached into the shadow between the ships, and a wind that seemed to seek out the men and their families swept into the harbor from the sea, shivering the air. The Delius began making harsh noises, and men broke away from embraces and outstretched arms to move up the gangway.

Her father spoke to her quickly and his shoulder board scratched her cheek. “You be good now, you hear? Take good care of your Mama and Ernie."

He pulled himself away and her mother moved into his side, her lavender dress soft against his uniform, and then he was climbing up to the ship.

Lee couldn’t find him among the figures that banded the decks and the bridge, but she could see that her mother’s eyes were fixed on a place directly above her on the ship’s superstructure.Mrs. Palmer waved and Lee wondered how she could think that one of those forms was the right one and the others were not. But one of them waved back in the way her father did, so Lee pointed to him and got Ernie to waggle his small arms back.

There were no men on the dock now and many of the women were walking quickly away, leading or carrying their children back through the gates where the Shore Patrol stood watch.

The gangway was drawn aboard, the hawsers with their metal rat-guards thrown down, and the ship was freed. It throbbed slowly away from the dock and her mother moved with it as it eased along the length of the pier, her eyes holding to the figure on the bridge while she threaded her way through the women and children who remained.

Lee tried to get Ernie to walk behind their mother, but he cried to be carried. The skipper’s wife scooped him up and went with them to the dock’s end. Mrs. Palmer’s arm was still in the air and, farther and farther away in the harbor, the man who waved like her father still moved his hand back and forth slowly over his head.

“Bastards!" said the skipper’s wife. Taller than Emily Palmer, her hair rolled in a high pompadour, she was facing the troop ship, where Marines were laughing and shouting, some of them hanging over the rails and waving.

“Don’t worry honey, you’ll find another one!"

“How about me, cutie? I’d jump ship for you."

“Hey, there’s always the 4-Fs—don’t cry too long, babe."

The remaining Delius women were glaring at them or pretending not to hear or leaving angrily. The skipper’s wife handed Ernie to Emily Palmer and hugged her quickly before hurrying away, high heels making small angry hits along the pier. Ernie thought the Marines were funny and gurgled happily at them. Mrs. Palmer still had not turned away from the Delius, though it had moved so far away that Lee thought it looked like one of the models on her father’s desk.

“Mama, I can’t see him anymore."

She looked at Lee, startled, perhaps, that she was there.

“But he has binoculars, he can see us."

She turned quickly back to the ship, holding it firm with her eyes, with the intensity of her need to stay linked to Ernest Palmer. Unstoppable in its purpose, in the gravity of its mission, the Delius bore him away, beyond her reach, beyond her sight.

Lee had thought her mother didn’t hear the Marines, then realized that they had gone silent. Their ship had begun to move too, easing away from the dock to take its place in the convoy that was moving under the Golden Gate, out of the soft, sheltering arms of the California hills that enclosed the harbor, into the Pacific and the war.

A voice called out, “Goodbye dear," and another, “Goodbye—take care." Men began calling down from all over the troop ship, and Lee could not understand who they were talking to.

“Don’t worry darlin,’ I’ll be OK."

“Think of me."

“I love you."

“Goodbye."

“Goodbye."

The toy Delius gone, Emily Palmer smiled, waved, and nodded her head in answer to the Marines.

She stayed there, still waving, until their ship too, disappeared. Then she walked slowly away, with her children, in the gray light that flooded the empty pier.

27 August 2007

Heroes & Stars

A football star admits he’s been involved in dogfighting. The fans and much of the country at-large go ballistic.

Well, let’s think a bit here. The guy excels at one of the most combative sports imaginable. He’s really good at it.

Why, please tell me, is it shocking that he’s also involved in an aggressive, dangerous competition that pits dogs against each other. Is that it? That people like dogs so much they think it’s fine to bash fellow humans around but not dogs?

There’s that. And I think there’s also the illogical assumption that great athletes are also great human beings. Some are. I’ll bet the same percentage of good/bad prevails among professional athletes as among the rest of us. But thinking that being great at moving a ball around makes someone a hero—there’s the rub.

Heroes are so much more than skilled or talented. There are artists, musicians and writers and yes, even athletes, that I think are cultural treasures, but they aren’t my heroes.

I don’t think it’s even fair to put the burden of heroism on superb performers. Remember Charles Barkley snarling into a television camera, “I’m not a hero"? Truth spoken. He was a great ball player. He didn’t claim to be a great human being as well.

So why not let up on these people? Admire their skills, enjoy watching them perform. Just don’t hang your idealism on them as well.

Because I haven’t misplaced my expectations, I’m not shocked or outraged by a sports star revealed as a dog-killing jerk. Why should he not be a creep just because he can throw a perfect pass?

I suggest we get real about performers. Let’s reserve the word “hero" for people like those at http://www.giraffe.org. Then we won’t be crushed when a fine quarterback turns out to be a moral bum.

25 August 2007

Look Out World, Here Come Young Frankenstein

Hmmm this software cut words off the title. It should be:
Look Out World, Here Come Young Frankenstein and Old Melvin Brooks

A few evenings ago we went to the out-of-town “opening night" of a musical headed for Broadway, an adaption of the movie Young Frankenstein. Both the 33-year-old movie and this new musical are by a writer/composer who’s now 81, Mel Brooks. We’d just listened on CDs to his 2000-year Old-Man routines, recorded when he was in his 30s, laughing our way through a long car trip.

The man has been making me laugh all my life. The stage on opening night was deep in references to all that this maniac knows about making people loose it to hilarity. Those references were such a part of my own howls, I felt sorry for the audience members who were too young to know how much was going on.

The sight gags, slapstick, bawdiness and vintage shtick were funny enough to have everyone in the house roaring, no matter how young they were. A perfect double-take is funny in and of itself even it it doesn’t trigger images of generations of comedians making the same move. The “build" of lines to the perfect topper kept bringing down the house. (Especially when the topper was “May I get you a soy mocha vente machiato?" Brooks was winking at Seattle.)

It was the kind of tuned-in, totally responsive audience that pumps performers to higher and higher levels. At the curtain, Brooks came onstage, to my total delight. “There are trucks waiting to take the production to New York. Now I’m ordering buses for this audience. You’re coming with us."

A New Yorker myself, I don’t think Brooks has to worry that this was only an out-of-town experience. I loved the venerable script, the over-the-top production values, and the sublime professionalism of the cast—-their timing, delivery, dance moves, and singing voices were flawless. The Broadway successes of The Producers and Spamalot seem to say that New Yorkers will have just as much fun as Seattleites with this masterful enhancing of a vintage silly movie.

But those references—-I had my own solo smile when the 30-something guy in front of me leaned over to his date and whispered, “Who’s Noel Coward?" She didn’t know.

There were black backpacks for sale in the lobby, printed with the huge words, “What hump?" I’m kicking myself for not buying one.

If the reference doesn’t ring for you, type the words into YouTube.

18 August 2007

Thank You, France

“She was the most beautiful girl on our campus."

Paris. An American friend in his 30s is talking about a classmate whose first novel has just been published back in the States. A good story, wonderfully written. Clearly the author was more than beautiful. But the conversation stayed with beauty.

“I got a buddy of mine a date with her and he’s still thanking me. It must be strange for a woman to have that kind of effect on people just from how she looks."

“You’re talking about the kind of woman who causes ripples across a room when she walks in."

“Exactly. That must be a very odd way to go through life."

Well, yes, it is. While it lasts. The conversation has moved off in other directions and I’m realizing with a mixture of amusement and alarm that this young male and I have been talking about creatures far different than the two of us, two “normal" people trying to imagine being that attractive.

I’d long before adjusted to no longer causing that kind of ripples. I’m of an age at which women once considered beautiful are described for some reason as “handsome." Or, dear God, “well-preserved." But now I was being told, in effect, that there was no discernible evidence that I had ever been a room-rippler. Sobering. I made a mental note to find some time for incorporating such a milestone into my ego-scape.

My views, experiences, knowledge and odd sense of humor make me sought-out company for this young friend and for others across a span of ages, no matter what I may look like after decades of arriving at all those views, experiences, etc. etc. I could deal with this innocent feedback. No need to bemoan beauty so completely lost if one is still welcomed warmly into the room. The conversations rolled on, the good company, good food, laughter.

Leaving Paris some days later, I was proceeding toward my departure gate when I was blocked by a clump of British tourists standing around a young Frenchman in an tour-guide jacket. I tried to see my way around them.

The guide’s voice sailed over their heads, “Let’s all move this way, this way, to let the beautiful woman pass by." I looked for her. The guide gestured to me, beaming. “Si beau. So lovely. Passez, madame. Passez."

I rolled my carry-on past the Brits and their gracious guide, trying not to laugh out loud, my re-inflated ego silently saying, “Thank you, France, thank you." I could perhaps wait a bit longer before settling into cronehood.

14 August 2007

Rose Petals & Echoes

The afterword to Arias, Riffs & Whispers (see Works to the left of this screen) quotes Don Marquis, who wrote: “Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." The afterword goes on to invite echoes from readers of the book.

Well, that rose petal does sometimes echo resoundingly in responses from readers. One came in a few days ago that about did me in.

A man in the southwest ordered his second copy of Arias because he’d given his copy to a friend. (I love it when that happens—-makes me think someone really treasured the book.) And with his order he sent a question.

He cited three poems in the book: “Understanding Cortez," “Spa" and “Tonantzin." The reader described himself as a Mexican American who wanted to know who I was and how I knew these things about his world.

I sent him a new copy and a note telling him I have no history with Mexico, have been no farther into the country than Northern Baja and have no idea where those poems came from.

It reminded me of another reader who wrote that he was sure I hadn’t been in the Trade Center when it fell but that “Luisa," a poem in the voice of a data clerk who died that day, had told him what it must have been like to be there. How did I know?

I can’t answer either of these readers. I just wrote. And there they were. The voices. The stories.

Now, these echoes rising up from the canyon. Makes dropping rose petals seem well worth the doing.

7 August 2007

Parsifal Potter

I’ve just finished the long saga, closing the last book at midnight of a Friday. It’s been a grand ride.

Thinking about the Potter phenomenon, I have been beguiled by the backstory—Repeatedly Rejected Manuscript Becomes Publishing Phenom—and annoyed with the critics who have dismissed the works as “rehashes" of earlier stories.

How about “re-telling of myths deeply rooted in our psyches"? That’s what I see in the series and in the world-wide thirst for them.

The archetype of the Holy Fool is foundational in our understanding of humanity. Parsifal, who is the embodiment of the Fool in western culture, “goes into the dark forest, alone, at a place where there is no path." Parsifal must find the Grail. Harry must find and destroy the objects in which evil is stored. In both stories, finding these hidden objects will stop the suffering of the people.

Harry begins the tales a child and grows into the beginnings of manhood as evil forces grow stronger and more oppressive of the people. Like Parsifal, he’s too young, too inexperienced. Others more qualified have tried before him to stop the malevolent Lord Voldemort and have failed. But no one else has the smallest chance of succeeding. Harry accepts the quest, because the suffering of the people must be ended. This is Parsifal revisited.

I’ve spent decades of my life writing about courage, finding ways to move more people into courageous action for the common good. The linchpin is usually a person who, like Harry, like Parsifal, steps forward alone, taking responsibility even when they may not seem the best person in the world for the task. when the odds look impossible and dangers abound.

The turning point in so many of these real-life stories is the moment when others, good people previously silent and inactive, see one brave soul stepping forward and say, “We’re with you," coming to the initiator’s side. It’s the moment when a movement is born, when hope comes to life and change becomes possible.

It’s the moment in the last Harry Potter book when this reader was overcome. As the 17-year-old boy accepts his fate, overcomes his fears, and moves into action against the seemingly all-powerful Voldemort, he is astonished to find other characters in the tale rallying to his side, refusing to let him proceed alone, insisting that they fight beside him.

That’s the goal of my work at the Giraffe Heroes Project—the enCouraging of the good, caring, quiet people who can look at what a Giraffe Hero is doing and realize that they too need to stand up and sound off, to take a stand for what is right.

I haven’t cried over a “children’s" book since I was a kid myself, but Rowling got me when the good people in Harry’s life chose to stand beside him and fight. It was the perfect turning point in this new and strong telling of an old old story.

6 August 2007

Rant Replies

The previous post brought in a flurry of impassioned agreement and some interesting anecdotes. Here are a few:

As for the first-name business, I'm with you... I do have fun though because the same mentality can't handle anything as outlandish as Hazlehurst and when they call for Hazel I just keep reading. I did grieve for my mother-in-law who was an Alzheimer patient in a nursing home. She wouldn't allow anyone she hadn't known for fifty years to call her by her first name and it wouldn't have cost the staff one penny to humor her.—Hazlehurst Beezer

I was with my husband at a doctor's office recently & they called his name at the admittance door--"Frank?" No answer. "Frank?" No answer. "Mister Seidner" (pronounced seeedner). "Yes?" "How do you spell your first name?" (She wondered about the Francis/Frances thing)... Answer: "M-I-S-T-E-R"... The waiting room clapped.—Lee Seidner

Flip-flops should be left at the door, properly, and bare or socked feet indoors, including the White House. Why allow people to track their street grime around these institutions?—Drew Kampion

I was once at a UW clinic for a longstanding problem with dizziness. The first doctor worked me up, then called in the big guns. He described my symptoms etc to Dr Big Shot, never once referring to me by name. I was just some anonymous "she." So when he finished the work-up and Dr Big Shot (who had better people skills) introduced himself to me, I took his hand, shook it, and said "And I'm 'she.'"—Lynn “She" Willeford

Funny that such a directive would come from the White House. A few years ago, I went to an education forum-farce there, and I sat next to Bush's daughter. It was the blonde one who was helping a friend start a charter school. Well, she had on flip-flops, and was dressed like a slut. And not even a pricey one! She was a bit of a dimwit, too.—Name withheld to prevent IRS NSA DOJ invasion of the sender’s life

1 August 2007

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I’m in shock. It’s probably been decades since I found myself agreeing with anything coming out of the White House. This week it happened. A dress code was posted for visitiors there, requiring a certain formality in entering that beautiful focal point of our national history. No jeans, sneakers, shorts, miniskirts, T-shirts, tank tops or FLIP FLOPS—the capitalization was theirs.

Wahoo! This is so overdue.

I’m thinking of the embarrassment I’ve felt in traveling the world and seeing my compatriots wearing all the above, in museums, in plazas, in temples. David Sedaris asked the right question, reflecting on Americans in Paris: Why would they arrive in that beautiful place dressed as if they’d come to mow the lawns?

Why indeed.

Flip flops at the White House were in the news last year when a college girls’ sports team arrived for a photo with the President and several were seen to be wearing these wonderfully useful and practical shower sandals.

I have several pair myself. I wear them at the beach. In the shower at my gym. In private. Flip flops (actually zoris—I’ve been wearing them since I lived in Japan eons ago) are wonderful. I have been to the White House, both as a tourist and as an invitee. I have not worn shower shoes.

The Rooney Factor is nibbling at me. Excessive codgering can get tiresome. But here’s still more on the problem of excessive informality: if I meet you in a business or professional context, I will not call you by your first name nor do I want you to call me by mine. I do not know you. I am probably older than you are. I may someday be Your Buddy Ann, but not yet. Right now, you’re better off with Ma’am.

Particularly irksome—physicians’ offices where a 20-something assistant summons me to the inner sanctum by calling out “Ann?" in the reception room. Aside from being disrespectful, it’s inefficient. There may be any number of Anns sitting there reading old Newsweeks. There will, I’m sure, be only one Medlock. It gets really over-the-line when I get to the MD’s desk. “Well, Ann, I see you’ve been referred here by Dr. XYZ." Wait. We’ve never met. I’m a paying customer. Using my first name gets us off on a path that isn’t promising for solving the problem at hand, whatever it may be. So I check his nameplate and reply, “Yes, Charlie, Dr. XYZ did recommend I see you…."

It’s a startling moment. The respectful “Dr." is expected. But I’m for mutual respect in this and all other public situations. If the White House honors your team with an award, or just welcomes you for a look-see at its beautiful rooms, you reciprocate by arriving dressed appropriately to the dignity of the place. If you’re talking to someone you don’t know, someone who has some years on you, and maybe even some achievements that might be admirable, try Ma’am. Try Sir. Try respect.

Here endeth my Rooney-snit.

24 June 2007

Wallet Words IV

Awhile back, I asked friends "What's in your wallet, as in, what words mean enough to you to carry around with your driver's license and your MasterCard?" The words below come from Weda Gregorieff, an extraordinary woman whose American ancestors include poets, artists, historians and architects. She added to the romantic heritage, writing her own poetry and managing a world-ranging household for her husband, a White Russian emigre who joined US Army Intelligence. A widow now, Weda lives in a country house in South Carolina, where she is the only senior Senior I know who loves emailing and Googling.

JUST A GIDDY GREEN FROG
Where there was a leap-frog
There was I —
Stumbling on a lily-pad
Croaking for a sigh,
Sending jets of spray-foam
Tumbling to the sky
Waterfalls of bright light
Lovelier than I.

Who bemoans a green frog
Shiny though he be?
Wet through with green tears
Underneath the sea;
Flashing through a sun-burst
Clumsy in high glee,
Sinking through a bubble-bed
Drowning merrily!

“Nothing but a leap-frog!"
(I’m a creature too)
“Nature has her own way —
And what is he to you?"
Just a giddy, green frog
With a life to woo
Soundless as the whole world
—(What am I to you?)

REFLECTIONS
Back I come
To the ordained;
As the swan in dive below is one,
On surface, twain.

LOVER’S QUARREL
When all is quiet again,
Let the real shadow come out
And enjoy the scene that belongs
To him.

All © Weda Gregorieff

7 May 2007

More Wallet Words

There are new words in my wallet, heard at Burning Word poetry festival in April, read by the poet herself -- hilariously. But it says so much about the serious matter of protecting one's time, to write.

The Art of Disappearing

When they say Don't I know you?
Say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say Why?

It's not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

19 January 2007

Fixing the Sequence

I'll post this as a separate "article" so it can be read sequentially instead of backwards. Should be up this weekend in the Works section of this website. Meanwhile, don't start at the top--go to the Blue Boob words that are marked 11/28, read down, and then come back up to the last entries. This format continues to confound me.

Here Endeth the Chronicle

Thursday, January 18, 2:40 pm

Another hurdle surmounted. Well, maybe stumbled over. Our easy-arrival plan worked yesterday (we stayed in a hotel five minutes from Overlake) but the hospital intake operation jammed somewhat--left hand not knowing etc. etc.

In the wire-placing department, they considered calling it off because I'd taken a 5g Valium (my first ever) before arriving, therefore before signing their Consent form. Even though the surgeon had OKd taking it. Even though I was obviously fully alert (wishing I were not).

After much caucusing and probably a call to Legal, they decided they could go ahead and wire me. BTW that hurts. Especially when they do two mammograms with the wire in place.

Kept wishing I could just skip Wednesday and be past it all, into Thursday, home, with the whole thing behind me. Be Here Now is realy a bitch in some times and places, though I did keep reminding myself to observe it all, and to connect with the caring, funny staffers. Amazing how much laughter does erupt naturally, despite--or because of--the stress.

Moving on up to Surgery, I actually got in earlier than scheduled--the woman ahead of me that morning was sent home for having taken an aspirin! But they didn't care atall about my Valium. And it was helping a bit. A bit. But not a fraction as much as the "relaxant" the anesthesiologist started into an IV. Let's hear it for heavy drugs! (But not for needles--I now have a blue hand.)

I was noting a bizarre overhead light in the surgery--looked like an outer-space octopus--when surgeon Kristi said, just before the drip turned to Lights Out, that she was enjoying my Blue Boob Chronicles--I had printed her a copy of these messages.

Less than an hour later John was telling me that she said it had gone perfectly. A foggy hour or so more then two cans of pop, some saltines and graham crackers. I haven't had a soft drink in maybe forty years, but it tasted good. And the salt, lovely. Sugar, yum. It puzzles me that hospitals give people junk food but maybe the emotional outweighs the nutritional. It sure did for me the night before--faced with a restaurant menu that had plenty of healthy items, I went for pasta in a cream sauce and warm chocolate cake--after starting with a martini. Gin, butter, cream, chocolate--nutrition shmutrition.

Now I've got my wish that it be Thursday. Amazing how that works, isn't it? Home. Down comforter. Books. Laptop. DVDs. Drugs. It's lovely.

Yes, I will tell you what the phone call says tomorrow. But this is today and all is well. Here. Now.

4:49 pm January 18

The ever-speedy Kristi Harrington MD called a day early.

"Your pathology report is in. No atypical cells, just papillary, no cancer, no more surgery, no radiation, you're done."

Be Nein
Bee Nine
Benign--a lovely, lovely word.

What a long strange trip it's been--departure date November 9, arrival at "You're done," January 18.

Thank you for such good company on the journey.

Here endeth the Blue Boob Chronicles. I'm thinking champagne.

14 January 2007

The Blue Boob Chronicles

Not being savvy at using this site to contact friends and allies, I’ve been emailing them about my adventures in MammoLand—the strange world of lump analysis, much of which involves watching one’s breast turn blue. Here, collected, are the messages thus far.

11/28/06

John and I are holed up in Bellevue at my son David's house, where there's light, heat and wi fi. Whidbey Island is dark and cold right now—heavy snow weighted and broke power lines, and more snow is expected.

We sawed through four trees to get out of our road yesterday, made it through snow and ice and over the waters to keep my appointment with a breast specialist at Overlake Hospital here in Bellevue. Decided to stay over rather than chance not getting back to Overlake for a needle biopsy tomorrow at 1:30.

FYI I've been chasing this one since November 9--if I've seemed a bit distracted, this would be why. Feeling some better since yesterday's long session with Kristi Harrington MD, who emphatically ruled out inflammatory breast cancer (very low survival rate) and gave me all the reasons why I should agree to the needle biopsy of two anomalies that showed up on ultrasound the day before Thanksgiving.

Harrington is a find--she listens, answers, understands being freaked out, knows when to laugh. Until getting to her and the Overlake team, I felt I was in an assembly line run by rigidly programmed robots--not good for one's freak-out quotient.

I'm still deeply rattled and it feels like time to stop holding all this close--I could use some sisterly company on this journey. I know lots of us have been through this, some to discover all is well, some into treatment. As soon as I get the test results I'll let you know which it is for me.

Hang in with me tomorrow--I'm not as tough as I'd like to be.

11/30

Now holed up at step-daughter Malory's apartment on Capitol Hill (that's a hip part of Seattle--many cool restaurants).

Got Fred Meyer replacement underwear and a pair of pajamas--we left the house Monday ill-equipped to be orphans of the storm.

I was a wuss for the biopsy--so rattled--but the Overlake crew was superb--so human and caring and totally competent.

Ice packs now. Ice is good. Turns out Viognier and hot toddies are not so good. Seemed like a good idea last night but for someone who hasn't been drunk since 1966...

The Overlake crew was adamant that they'd call with pathology news by Friday afternoon.

We just got word that the power is back on at the house and the downed trees are off the roads, so we can go home and wait for the news in clean clothes.

As soon as I get the report, I'll let you know. Thanks for being with me yesterday. I didn't like it at all, but it was good to know I was far from alone.

12/12

I thought I knew what I was getting into. After all, I had an MRI once. Lots of noise. Headphones playing music. A blindfold so you don't look at the fact that you're inside a little tube.

Hah! This was a boob MRI and the differences started with a bizarre foam form that made it possible to go into the tube face down. Hollows for bent knees, holes for breasts, a strange cradle for the face, and grooves for arms--raised alongside the head. Aaargh. It was uncomfortable from the get-go and there was at least half an hour of not moving ahead.

I hadn't taken a tranquilizer or painkiller because I thought I was just going to be stretched out on my back, meditating, as before. I shoulda took both pills! Nice women running the gear covered me with blankets--the space had to be cold, for the machine. I shook anyway.

There was a rapid pulse under the music--like an infant's heartbeat--a really big infant--then rhythmic banging and clanging for minutes at a time, different pitches, tones and beats with each restart--I wondered what Steve Reich would do with the sounds--definite symphonic potential, if you like dissonance.

Being belly down after drinking, on instruction, a quart of water, was getting extremely uncomfortable, not to say worrisome. How much longer would it be? Shift focus to aching shoulders--better than pining to pee. They said an MD was coming in to trigger an IV into the needle they'd put in my arm--for a contrast dye. He better not be late. The dye better not add to the gottago sensation.

Can I make the shoulders stop hurting? Breathe good air into them. They feel red. Can I make them blue? yellow? teal? "A few more minutes. You OK?" in the headphones. "My shoulders hurt." "Hang on. Not much longer."

What's the worst thing that can happen? My shoulders will be stiff for awhile. And I could wet my pants. Hmmm. There's quite a storm outside so I could stand in it when I get out of this thing and pass for rain-drenched. To hell with it. Sister Eulalia isn't here with the ruler across the palm. I don't make it, I don't make it. Let's make the shoulders lavender.

Remember you wanted these pictures. Remember all the research that said the answers will be in these pictures. Little sips of air. Don't want big gulps of this magnetized, Star Trek air. The trembling is getting severe enough to louse up the pictures. I will not cry.

Think about the rack. If I were a prisoner of the Inquisition, there would be cranks pulling on your hands and feet. That would be worse than this. So much worse. I can get through this. Maybe.

"That's it. You're done." There'd been no sensation from the dye--I thought there was still that to come, but it's over. I’m extruded from the tube, hands are helping me up, helping me rub my shoulders. That's nice but let me have my clothes and aim me at a restroom!

Walking in the wonderful rain, moving anything I want to move, seeing color and John's good face, hearing real sounds--what wonders abound.

Out of a long tub now, holed up with a down comforter, chalking up another ordeal survived.

Next, the pictures, the date for the surgical biopsy. Or--hey--maybe the pictures will say there isn't anything there after all. Could happen if it really were Star Trekian--a machine like that should fix whatever's wrong, not just take pictures. Someday.

In the meantime, I'm loving the ideas that are coming in from people on my email list on how to console oneself when ass-over-teakettle. Lovely lovely stuff. And funny.

12/12

Fast call from ever-rapid Kristi Harrington MD: the MRI showed "enhancement" at the site of the needle biopsy, no lesions, and some cells that are "not quite normal." All in all, a reading that's not hugely alarming, but a surgical biopsy is still the protocol. Not urgent though. It'll be mid-January.

The holidays just got happier.

1/15

Sending this alert now, because the next few days are going to get hectic—hugely busy time at work, getting everything lined up for being away, first for Wednesday’s surgical biopsy, then for a week in the Cascades. We’ll be at Sleeping Lady for our annual winter R&R, this time with much stress to Rest up from.

Actually, I’m feeling amazingly calm. I did get a prescription for my first-ever Valium, in case I start to hyperventilate on the way in the door. But for now, without prescription assistance, I’m easy with the whole thing. Just don’t feel like I’m in trouble. Prescience or denial, who knows?

I’ve booked us into the hotel nearest Overlake for Tuesday night so we won’t be worrying about missing the ferry or getting stuck in traffic. I’m in the Radiology door at 8 AM for the placement of a wire that’s to guide the surgeon. Estimated time of the surgery, 11 AM.

Hold some good thoughts West Coast morning time, from wherever you are.

I’ll be back home that evening, I hope not barfing from some nasty anesthetic. Lab results due Friday and we’ll leave for Sleeping Lady Sunday, rejoicing that it’s over, done, finished, false alarm, all’s well.

26 August 2006

A Fuller Story

A fuller story of "Mollie's Son My Son" than the poem below is now on this website. To read it, click on Home at the left. On that page, scroll down to click on "Looking for Michael."

20 May 2006

Mollie's Son My Son

Dark hair sure smile strong arm around
her son my son. He is laughing,
pudgy fingers patting Mollie
as her lap and arms enclose him.
I knew this picture before I saw it,
knew he was happy, loved, protected.
Finding him, half a century on,
I see this image of him just weeks older
than when I let him go, and I yearn
to have this proof that it was right
to give him over, that my certainty
has not been self-serving but a message
conveyed without contact, from Mollie
who had no child grow within her
but grafted my son onto her steady tree,
my son her son, who stands here now,
handing me this photo with a smile,
telling me his life has always been good,
his presence and the portrait
proof that I was right to drive away
from that country crossroad,
entrusting him to fate, to Mollie,
my son Mollie’s son, telling me
he is happy now, to know me.

Below: Mollie, Peter, and John Newbould, Peter's big brother, also adopted.

8 May 2006

Milestone?

Speaking of "late in life," I just celebrated a new marker--73. It's a strange number to absorb. We all have templates in our minds for what it's like to be various ages. Trust me, whatever you believe about people in their 70s is wrong. You won't know how wrong till you get here.

Meanwhile I'm thinking, well, 73 is a prime number. Other than that, it's of no particular interest, though it's fun to have people react with "No you're not!" I enjoy jamming circuits of preconceptions.

1 May 2006

Burning words

Saturday I read six poems at the Burning Word poetry festival, a day-long event that has hundreds of poets convening in an old winery. I don't know if there were any readers present or if every attendee was a poet waiting a turn to speak. Still, it was lively. Now if there were just a real audience of eager readers for poetry...

I'm beginning to feel some at-homeness in this lit world, and to have opinions about what's poetry and what isn't. I was so unsure when I did Arias, I called it "words written for voices," rather than poetry.

Now I'm getting cranky. People chopping prose into short lines are beginning to annoy. And poet/critic Joan Houlihan is making worlds of sense with her rants against language poets, prose posing as poetry, and brand-name poets who've gotten lazy and ought to take a break from writing.

And every day there's a new poet to explore. It's kind of fun coming into an unexplored world, so late in life.